Networks such as ad hoc wireless sensor networks are increasingly being used for sensing, detection, and tracking, and are being applied in military, ecological, environmental, and domestic system applications for monitoring and control. Wireless sensor networks are also being used to automate buildings, universities, factories, etc.
The nodes in a wireless sensor network comprise sensors that communicate with one another via a wireless channel. The composition and deployment scenarios of sensors in a wireless sensor network are varied.
The wireless sensor network is often considered to be one of the most constrained computational environments because memory, power, and computational capabilities of the wireless sensor network are all limited. On the other hand, these limited capabilities also mean that the nodes of the wireless sensor network can be provided at low cost. However, this lower cost makes the sensor nodes prone to failure and energy depletion, which are typically countered by resorting to dense deployment of sensors.
In many applications of wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are randomly deployed, sometimes scattered by airplanes in hostile terrain. Such networks are, therefore, referred to as ad hoc wireless sensor networks. Because of the ad hoc nature of these networks, few assumptions can be made about their topologies, and algorithms that route data and/or code through such networks must provably work over any arbitrary deployment.
The present invention relates to mobile agents that have the capability of satisfactorily operating in such environments.